Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/315

 feuds, wars, jealousies and conflicts (in the case of intermarriage between villages) is breaking down with the improved facilities for transportation and the co-operation between villages in religious and educational matters.

Superior tools have partially done away with the tyranny of the master craftsman. The man who is poor, but ambitious, finds it easier to acquire a guest house than it would have been when the laborious highly specialised work was done with stone tools. The use of some money and of cloth, purchased from traders, has freed women from part of the immense labour of manufacturing mats and tapa as units of exchange and for clothing. On the other hand, the introduction of schools has taken an army of useful little labourers out of the home, especially in the case of the little girls who cared for the babies, and so tied the adult women more closely to routine domestic tasks.

Puberty was formerly much more stressed than it is to-day. The menstrual taboos against participation in the kava ceremony and in certain kinds of cooking were felt and enforced. The girl's entrance into the Aualuma was always, not just occasionally, marked by a feast. The unmarried girls and the widows slept, at least part of the time, in the house of the taupo. The taupo herself had a much harder life. To-day she pounds the kava root, but in her mother's day it was chewed until jaws ached from the endless task. Formerly, should a defection from chastity be disclosed at her marriage, she faced being beaten to death. The adolescent boy faced tattooing, a painful, wearisome proceeding, additionally stressed by group ceremony and taboo. To-day, scarcely half of the young men are tattooed; the tattooing is performed at a much more advanced age and has no connection with puberty; the ceremonies have vanished and it has become a mere matter of a fee to the artist.

The prohibitions against blood revenge and personal vio-